ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the urban air quality modeling conducted under the BRIDGE project. It includes a description of the models and the inputs needed for its application. The models were applied to BRIDGE's case study cities, for a base situation, allowing its evaluation, and also for different urban planning alternatives (PA) and strategic scenarios devised in the project. Urban green space is a receptor for airborne particulate pollution. Urban air quality (URBAIR) model integrates the pre-processing of urban morphology, meteorological information and air pollutant emission data in a single tool specifically developed to run online in a decision support system (DSS) build under a geographical information system (GIS) platform. Traffic is considered as the main pollutant source in the study areas. Emissions are calculated by the pre-processor transport emission model for line sources (TREM) using traffic counts and average speeds provided by each city.
